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This project expands our understanding of Renaissance art and culture by providing new information for and analysis of the reception, interpretation, and reading of color in paintings. The Summer 2004 work studies the trade in pigments during the Renaissance by analyzing documents in the Archivio Datini in Prato (outside Florence). This exceptional archive provides ample documentation for trade, but scholars have not yet mined it for information on artists’ colors. These goods were central to the artists’ (and particularly painters’) craft; the project seeks to understand not only pigments as commodities, but also the ways in which their nature as commodities establishes a set of values that affects the reception of the paintings in which they play a prominent role.